One of my stories, “Gesprek Nonstop,” was published in the latest issue of Siren, a zine specializing in experimental art. The issue features plenty of unusual and adventurous work, ranging from poetry to photography, and I’m pleased to be included in it. Check it out here.

Helsinki Noir, a collection of crime stories set in Helsinki, is available in both English (Akashic Books) and Finnish (Like).

My contribution is “The Silent Woman”, a satirical tale that takes the most prototypical noir storyline imaginable (a femme fatale, a fall-guy loser and murder for money) and transplants it to Helsinki. I wanted to see what would happen if you were to play out that age-old story in the Finnish social environment. It’s mainly an excuse for dark culture-clash comedy, as the narrator is a self-absorbed, self-pitying Brit. The reviews are all over the place, as could be expected, with one newspaper reviewer selecting it as one of the best of the collection and another singling it out as one of the worst.

I’ve been slow to post about Helsinki Noir due to the death of the editor, James Thompson. RIP, good buddy.

I don’t worship originality. To paraphrase Roger Ebert, a story is not what it’s about, but rather how it’s about it.

I believe that there’s a time and place to retell old stories with new words — to let your hair down and rock out with your cock out.

A good basic genre story is like a three-chord pop song: simple and to the point, with something about it that makes the familiar fun again. Too much innovation can break the comfort-food pleasures of genre in ridiculous ways, like a prog musician mistaking complexity for depth. (I’ll take The Ramones over Yes any day.)

One of my ongoing projects is to write riffs on familiar genre stories to see if I can wring a few fresh drops of blood out of them — some of them are tongue in cheek, with the familiarity of the tropes as part of the joke.

It’s a fun thing to do. Pointless, of course, but most fun things are. So why not.

The good folks at Festivale Online Magazine asked me to answer their Usual Questions. You’ll find my answers here. Be sure to check out how other writers — including Lawrence Block, Janet Evanovich and George R.R. Martin, to name but a few — answered the questions.

There’s a feeling I sometimes get when I jog in the dark woods after midnight – a brief sense that there’s someone at my heels (but it’s only echoes of my footsteps). For a split second, I feel like a child again. It’s both wonderful and disconcerting. Our lives are full of such moments. Here’s another example: when, all of a sudden, I realize that I’m doing something without conscious thought, simply out of habit. The realization is like being shaken awake.

When that happens, I become aware of the layers of my own consciousness – of the fact that the rational self is a rickety shack on the edge of a volcano.

Great works of art have a similar effect on me. They knock away, if only for a moment, the illusion of the self that’s accreted over the years.

We’re not here for very long. Stay awake.

H.R. Giger, the master surrealist, has died. His work both unsettled and inspired me. I dedicate this post to him. R.I.P.

I’ve been taking a break from writing. These past two months, I haven’t written anything new. It’s not the first time. Usually these idle periods last a few months, but the longest break I took was well over a year.

These hiatuses usually signal shifts in my interests.

That’s definitely true this time. I’ve done all I wanted to do with the kinds of stories I’ve been writing. Boredom was setting in. Time to try something different again, something that feels fresh. It would be safer to stick to the tried and true, but I figure that if I’m not evolving (or devolving, as the case may be), what’s the point? Where’s the fun in that?

I’ve enjoyed writing first drafts with a pencil. So much so that I now prefer it to composing on a computer.*

There are two main reasons:

1) Writing by hand feels more personal, for whatever reason. This is reflected in the stories I’ve been working on. The last story I completed, in May, is typical of the new crop. Most of it is drawn directly from experience, though transmuted into a fantastic/metaphoric mode (what Rudy Rucker calls transrealism)**. When I’m typing, I find it hard to write about myself. And this is partly because:

2) My internal editor is a fucking Nazi swine. I’m not kidding. I copyedit for a living, so when I’m at the keyboard, he’s always on my case – Achtung! Halt! Das ist nicht korrekt, you pigdog! – which results in – Dummkopf! – a stop-start-stop rhythm. Having that Nazi swine permanently ensconced in my brainpan makes it doubleplusharder to get into a flow state while at the keyboard. Writing longhand silences the bastard.

So, yes – although repetitive fucking strain is a pain, having to cut down on keyboard time turned out to be a boon. Silver linings and all that.

Hallefuckinglujah.

*In fact, I wrote the rough draft of this blog post by hand.

**This is a mode that pleases me. The stories feel richer, deeper. I reckon that I’ll focus on this kind of essentially autobiographical material from now on, at least in the case of my short stories, rather than trying to Make Shit Up to market requirements. The latter kinds of stories are much easier to sell, but fuck it.***

***Sorry about all the footnotes. I’m currently reading Infinite Jest, y’see.